We wish you rest.

A message to educators as we near the start of winter break: 

We’ve been hearing the refrain from teachers that they are exhausted. The summer was full of fresh ideas and hope and promises that this year would be different or smoother or more joyful - and perhaps it is, but this year may also have had its share of hardships.

Perhaps, for instance, schools have doubled down on the “learning loss” crisis and have implemented programs and initiatives and assessments that ask teachers to do more (instruction, differentiation, re-teaching, data gathering, etc.) to support students in “catching up.”

Or perhaps, your school has been one of the many who accepted new migrant families and students into classrooms, and you have students who have experienced the trauma of migration and are transitioning to new environments that may or may not be welcoming or safe or clean and are learning a new language, new social norms, and new learning expectations.

Perhaps, COVID and other viruses have made you or your students ill - and  there are less community protections, resources, access to masks, purifiers, and vaccines.

Perhaps you or your students have been impacted by the ongoing humanitarian crises and genocides in Palestine, Sudan, or the Congo, or the war in Ukraine and have been following the protests and actions for ceasefire in Gaza and have been at a loss to explain the blatant disregard for human rights and international law. Cook County has the largest population of Palestinians than anywhere else in the nation.

Perhaps news media, social media, and technology have inserted themselves in ways that stoke more fear and misinformation and that make it difficult to create safe spaces or have meaningful conversations. Perhaps your students have experienced or have read about the rise of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim hate or violence. Perhaps your school district has been in the center of battles over book bans and curricular censorship.

Perhaps you just found out a student is unhoused, or some of your students are frequently absent, there was a lice incident just last week, or a student arrived to school late, missed breakfast, and is now hungry.

And all of this is overwhelming. All of this requires your time, energy, focus, and emotional strength. And we have barely even mentioned curriculum or standards. 

You have made it this far in the year. 

As we approach winter break, I am reminded of Tricia Hersey’s words in her book Rest is Resistance about the very systems (white supremacist, patriarchal, and capitalist) that run on and depend on workers who are tired and burned out. The education system is a perfect example of toxic grind culture, where one is expected to be perpetually exhausted and disconnected from yourself and each other and where one is situated in a sense of urgency and binaries of what is right and wrong (for kids).

Hersey argues that we can rest, we can make space in our lives to rest, and therefore dream, and therefore connect back to ourselves, our bodies, our funds of wisdom, our communities. Rest is resistance to the systems because to “continue to dream up ways to feel and find rest, care, and healing is liberation.” As Hersey speaks from her experience, identity, and history as a Black woman in America, I am thinking about the importance of her message to educators, and especially Black and Latinx educators.

 So, when we say we wish you rest this winter break, we mean more than sleeping in in the mornings. We mean rest in the ways Hersey defines it. We mean dreaming up ways to have a practice of rest in this profession. We mean dreaming. We mean imagining new worlds, new systems, new ways of being - both in and out of the classroom. We wish you rest.